Within an enterprise data system such as that designed by SAP™ development of that system continuously occurs, for example to solve problems within the system or to enable additional functionality. However, as enterprises are responsible for interacting with large numbers of people the implementation of changes are tightly controlled in order to mitigate the risk of any undesirable changes being introduced into the system.
The current method of implementing change within a data system involves the use of three different systems, a development system, a test system and a production system as illustrated in FIG. 1. In the development system changes to objects in the system are developed by programmers. Once a change has been sufficiently developed it is moved into the test system which mirrors the system that is used by the employees of the enterprise as far as possible. In the test system any effects of the change can be identified. If any further development is required occur to overcome issues which are identified in the test system then the transport request is rejected and returned to the development system for further development. Once, sufficient testing has occurred the changes can be imported into the “production system” which is the system used by employees of the enterprise to perform their day to day tasks.
In order to ensure that all of the data and objects related to a particular development are transported together an element called a transport request is used to move new features from one system to the next. When a transport request is created the developer adds objects to the transport request. When an object is added to the transport request any related development objects and categories are also added to the transport request an example of such a Transport Request is illustrated in FIG. 2. In a transport request five different types of files can be found, these are: data files which contain the data to be transported; cofiles which contain the different steps of the request; profile files which contain profile parameters, a transport log which contains logs, trace files and statistics; and support packs which contain update and enhancement related files.
It is important that this process is tightly controlled as, once a change is imported into the production system, the production system cannot automatically be returned to its previous state but rather a further transport request must be produced and developed to reverse the changes. This takes time and therefore is undesirable if a critical issue such as a function required for a commonly used business transaction no longer being operational, has been introduced into the production system.
Therefore what is required is an improved method for controlling the production system when a change is imported into it.